The Welfare State: Pensions, Healthcare and Education

Edited by Colin Robinson 2 Apr 2005

The sixth volume of The Collected Works of Arthur Seldon

Price: £13.95

This volume examines the failure of state-supported welfare programmes to benefit the people most in need of help. The eight articles and one book in this volume encompass forty years of criticism of the welfare state.

Seldon argues that the welfare state cannot, in the long run, solve the problem of poverty. It is driven by misguided egalitarian views which make it universalist, providing benefits for the middle classes as well as the poor. Because it finances welfare through taxation, it damages incentives to work. Moreover it diminishes motivations to save and to provide for ones family as the state appears to take over such responsibilities.